A wavefront sensor is a device for measuring the aberrations of an optical wavefront. Wavefront sensors have been used for eye aberration measurement by directing a narrow beam of light to the retina of an eye and sensing the optical wavefront coming out from the eye. For a relaxed emmetropic eye or a relaxed eye with aberrations completely corrected, the optical wavefront coming out from the eye is planar. If, on the other hand, the eye has optical aberrations, the wavefront coming out from the eye in a relaxed state will depart from being planar.
Traditional vision diagnostic, vision corrective and surgical refractive procedures, including auto-refraction, standard eye wavefront measurement, phoropter test, LASIK (Laser Assisted In-Situ Keratomileusis), LTK (Laser Thermokeratoplasty), SBK (Sub-Bowmans Keratomileusis), IntraLASIK (Intra-stromal corneal lenticule extraction), PRK (photorefractive keratectomy), LASEK (Laser Assisted Sub-Epithelium Keratomileusis), IOL (Intraocular lens, including multi-focal, accommodating and toric IOL) implantation, corneal onlay/inlay implantation/positioning, RK (Radial keratotomy), LRI (Limbal Relaxing Incision), CRI (Corneal Relaxing Incision), and AK (Arcuate Keratotomy), are generally conducted without any continuous wavefront measurement result being displayed in real time to the clinical practitioner to show the effect of the correction in real time (see for example U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,271,914, 6,271,915, 6,460,997, 6,497,483, and 6,499,843). Although wavefront sensors have been used to measure the refractive errors and higher order aberrations of the eye before, during, and after the dynamic vision correction process, these devices generally only produce a static snapshot display of the wavefront map of the measurement, thereby potentially missing information vital to the practitioner for optimization of the optical outcome.